Posts Tagged ‘Hierarchy’
Welcome Child – Br. Luke Ditewig
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Br. Luke Ditewig
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Mark 9:30-37
What were you arguing about? Jesus asked. Perhaps best scout for new outreach and lodging sites. Expert at crowd control. Food and goods purveyor. Scripture knowledge. Who is Jesus’ favorite. The greatest disciple.
Playful jostling can turn to comparing power and privilege, background, connection, and status. We wrestle and worry over: what am I worth? Am I enough? What do I have? What if Jesus asked you and me: What were you so anxious about?
Jesus said: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Servants were last, and the servant of all was the servant at the bottom with the least. This upends us seeking power, access, security, and more than we need.
Jesus “took a little child and put it among them, and taking it in his arms, and [Jesus] said to them ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.’” Like servants, children had no status or power. Let go of ego. Don’t cling to gifts, abilities, or background. Read More
The one, true, and living God – Br. Lucas Hall
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The Feast of St. Luke the Evangelist
Today, we observe the feast of St. Luke the Evangelist. There are two biographical bits of information that I think are important to understanding Luke’s theology.
First, Luke was likely a Gentile convert to belief in the Israelite God. He rejected his surrounding culture of Greek paganism, but probably had not fully adopted Israelite religion as a convert Jew. Instead, Luke was probably a God-fearer, a class of participants in Israelite religion that was not bound by the law of Moses, but was bound by the much simpler law given to Noah after the flood for all humanity. God-fearers were, then, on the margins: not quite Gentile, not quite Jew. In other words, Luke knew what it meant to be an outsider.
The second fact about Luke is that he was a physician. In this line of work, he would have treated patients from a wide variety of cultures, social standings, ethnic backgrounds, economic circumstances, and religions. Everyone gets sick. Everyone dies. The frailty of human bodies is a universal experience, something Luke would have been intimately familiar with. In other words, Luke knew that, when it comes to universal human experiences, there are no outsiders.
These two facts, Luke’s status as a social and religious outsider, and his work with universal human sufferings, seem to have worked together to craft a particular theological outlook. In his account of the Gospel, Luke focuses very much on outsiders, those ranking low in the social hierarchy. Maybe the best example of this is Mary, a young woman in a patriarchal society who acts as a direct, even priestly, mediator between God and humanity and a virgin who gives birth. This is not simply Luke expressing social concerns; he paints a picture of Mary bearing Christ in the world, and, in doing so, from her position of social weakness, encountering God more fundamentally than those in positions of high social status, and wielding great power and authority in doing so. Read More